NO ROM BASIC, System halted

Not what you want to see at the end of the boot sequence!
(For those who don't know, it means the BIOS has tried every known boot
device, including the BASIC in ROM that only existed on early IBM PCs, and
failed to find a valid boot sector.)

That's what happened to me last Tuesday night, when I finally sat down to
enjoy the chat in here. Actually that's what happened after I cancelled
Scandisk which was taking forever to get nowhere, and causing the hard drive
to clunk alarmingly.
So I dug out the Win98 Startup floppy, stuck it in the drive and tried again.
It booted into DOS and copied useful tools into a Ramdisk. I could see all my
drives, includin the one scandisk choked on. I tried running the version of
scandisk on the startup disk. I was a bit more informative and showed what it
was doing. While testing the directory structure, it found a bad sector, part
of the FONTS directory, which it offered to fix. I let it, it found an
unwritable sector and gave up, leaving me with no fonts directory at all.
Presumably Windows needs that directory, and the system fonts within it to
boot. I looked around a bit from the DOS prompt with DIR, and the contents
seem to be present, apart from the FONTS folder, though I can't tell if
they're damaged. I could copy stuff to my other HDD, but since they only get
8.3 format names I didn't bother. Since I was falling asleep, I decided not
to attempt messing with anything potentially damaging, shut down, and went to
bed.


Wednesday morning, before leaving for jbex, installed an old version of Zone
alarm, Magic Mail Monitor and Xnews on the spare, operational machine, from
the backup CD I made about a year ago, then tried to connect it to the cable
modem, with no success.

Wednesday evening, disconnected the power supply from the dodgy drive, in the
hope that the BIOS would find the priary partion on my big drive and boot
from that (Silly me, I should have tried that when I first installed the big
drive, and should have installed the OS properly, insead of just copying it
acress). Then it didn't even boot from floppy! Tried putting Windows CD in
CD drive - absolutely nothing. Gave up and tried connecting old computer to
cable modem again - still nothing. The Connection set-up wizard got as far as
asking whether i connect through dial-up or LAN, then totally ignored clicks
on the NEXt button.
I had to go out food shopping, and there on the display by the entrance was a
rack full of e-machine computers, laptops and desktops, all for £399. I
looked at the specs *very* carefully - and decided that I needed to check on
expandability - particularly the ability to plug my big drive in, as well as
on the reputaion of the manufacturer.

ANY EXPERIENCES WITH E-MACHINES, ANYONE?

Thursday, having downloaded much of Robin Walker's site on cable modems (from
jbex, on flash drive) I dewcided I was too tired and had an early night.


Friday - got all day to study the problem. By this time have remembered that
static IP address has been set (on a two machine LAN it's the easiest,
simplest, and probably only way (no DHCP server)), and where to alter it. So
I do. Try connecting to the CM status page. Success! Try a bookmarked page!
Success again! Run Magic mail Monitor and deal with a week's worth of spam,
plus out-of-date account information and spam filters.

Run Xnews and catch up on activity here.

Go back to dead machine and try again - still NO ROM BASIC, System halted.
Take Windows CD out of drive, put in other drive, try again. Success, of
sorts, it brins up boot menu, I choose Boot from CD, it gives me three
choices 1 Run setup 3) read help file 3) quit. I choose help, the file seems
to be only one screen long, but it says you might want to back up any data on
the drive. I choose quit, and find myself in DOS. DIR can read the floppy
which wasn't booting (but boots another machine).

Now, before I run setup and wipe out something important (I hope not) CAN
SOMEONE (pmj perhaps?) TELL ME IF LONG FILE NAME SUPPORT CAN BE ENABLED in
real MSDOS (not a DOS box from windows) that comnes with Windows 98 version
4.10.2222? If so, how? If it can, I can copy everything to safety without
losing the filenames.

Secondly, does Windows 98 Setup mess about with partitions, or otherwise
endanger the contents of any partition but the one it's installing windows
to? And does it mess up non-windows files on the logical drive it is
installing to?

I'll stop here for the moment and see what configuraion files I can get onto
a floppy.

--
Ali


.